The IEEE Engineering Management Society is set to be the first society to become a council. EMS will start doing business as the IEEE Technology Management Council on 1 January, a change approved by the IEEE Board of Directors at its February meeting.

Typically, councils become societies, not the reverse. There were operational reasons—in part related to the society’s financial situation—and strategic reasons for making the transition to a council, says the society’s president, Tariq Durrani. Also, a 2006 IEEE survey showed that many IEEE members would participate in engineering and technology management-related activities but would probably not join a society that deals only with management.

SOCIETY OVERSEERS By the end of February, 12 societies had joined the council: Aerospace and Electronic Systems; Circuits and Systems; Communications; Computer; Electron Devices; Industrial Electronics; Laser and Electro-Optics; Reliability; Signal Processing; Solid-State Circuits; Systems, Man, and Cybernetics; and Vehicular Technology. A representative from each of those societies will serve as a voting member on the council’s board of governors, which will oversee its publications, Durrani says. The representatives will give management topics greater exposure because the participating societies’ publications will carry articles on management issues and offer management tracks at their conferences in addition to those being offered by the council, he says. The council, in return, will promote the activities of the member societies.

Durrani says the council will continue to publish the Engineering Management’s Society’s Transactions on Engineering Management, the Engineering Management Review, and Engineering Management, the society’s newsletter. The council also will continue to sponsor the International Engineering Management Conference, and it will participate in the more than 60 EMS chapters throughout the world, which will be renamed Technology Management Council chapters, according to Durrani.

“Transitioning to a council was the obvious way of meeting the needs of IEEE members, enhancing the profile of the discipline…and addressing the challenging demands of the changing role of the engineer and engineering manager,” Durrani wrote in the management society’s first quarterly newsletter of 2007.

SURVEY RESULTS He noted that the results of a 2006 Member Value Study of close to 2500 current and former members reinforced the society’s decision to become a council. Asked to choose all the benefits they wanted, without concern for price, members placed EMS among the top four societies they would want to join.

In reviewing the survey results, Gerard “Gus” Gaynor, the 2008 Technology Management Council president-designate, told The Institute that “evidently, IEEE members across the board are interested in management topics, unfettered by disciplines. Therefore, it became obvious that EMS needed to expand its member base, involve a number of societies, and provide added value to the societies’ members.”

Gaynor added that in today’s ever-changing technical environment, engineers need to lead in the management of their organizations. “Innovation is at the heart of the engineering profession, and that involves putting on both business and management hats,” he says. “It’s not enough anymore to be only technically competent.”

Durrani plans to send a letter, explaining the details of the transition, to all current EMS members.